I’ve been kind of neglecting this blog lately. It’s not that I don’t have plenty of doom and gloom to spread about financial conditions and the end of life as we know it on Planet America. It’s just that ever since I finally made the leap and decided to devote most of my day to writing for a living, I’ve been deluged with writing projects-for-dollars that devour my formerly free time. This is a good thing, really. I never expected it, but I do think it’s a good thing to be offered this much work. On the down side, my volunteer work as freelance Cassandra has been getting short shrift.
But today, the Cassandra duty is impossible to ignore, no matter how much paid work I have on my plate. Last night the Fed announced another emergency quarter-point rate cut, and the establishment of a special temporary financial institution designed to bail out failing investment firms like Bear Stearns. Far from having the reassuring effect intended, Asian markets reacted to the news by dropping nearly 3% overnight. As if that weren’t alarming enough, Alan Greenspan chose last night to announce that, well, basically, we’re all f**ked… at least until we watch a bunch of other banks fail and until major regulatory changes are made.
So I have no idea what will happen on Wall Street after it opens today, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be boring. One of the projects I’m working on is about peak oil and its consequences, and I have to admit, I’m getting a bit freaked out myself. I spent the last week reading government studies that detail all the terrible things that will happen to us if we don’t drastically change our way of life at least 20 years before world oil production peaks, and other studies done by the US government and major oil companies (not Ralph Nader, not a bunch of socialist tree huggers, but rather, OIL COMPANIES AND THE US GOVERNMENT) that show pretty convincingly that oil production already has peaked, or is just peaking now.
If these studies are correct, then we are currently right at the topmost point of a roller coaster that is about to plunge at heart-stopping speed. I’m a little paranoid after researching this all week, but who wouldn’t be, given current events? I know that the sub-prime mess is supposed to be responsible for it all, but it strikes me that we seem to have entered an era in which any national crisis sends oil prices rocketing skyward. It started in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and prices have not calmed down since. The price of a gallon of gas here was $3.28 on Friday. By Sunday it was $3.39.
While unemployment held steady at 4.8% last month (actually dropping a tenth of a point from 4.9% in January), the percentage of people who want to work but have totally given up trying has hit 17%, a percentage not seen, ever, in the history of tracking such percentages. Also not included in the unemployment figures are recent college graduates and downsized middle-management persons working at WallMart and Starbucks for $7 and $8 per hour. And now even Starbucks isn’t doing so hot. Seems that when you are worried about financial survival, $6 cups of coffee are not that appealing.
At the bank where I now work part-time, a memo was sent out by corporate explaining to us underlings how to quash rumors that the bank is looking for a buyer; without actually saying that the bank isn’t looking for a buyer. In other words, yes, we are trying to unload this loser bank, but don’t say so if people call us freaking out about it, and by all means DON’T mention FDIC if you can possibly help it, because that will send them running right to a teller window just like back in the day. Oh, yes, and thanks for your loyalty and hard work blah blah blah have a nice day.
A memo like that, it’s not uplifting, you know?
This particular bank had one of the largest sub-prime mortgage portfolios in the business. They dumped as much of it as they could as the crisis was just beginning, but their stock has not seen upward movement since then. Down at my level, I can’t sell so much as a lolly-pop all of a sudden. To make commission, I have to first sell nearly half a million dollars in new money bank products. Commission pay kicks in after that. Last month I sold $60,000. Today, more than halfway through the month, I’ve sold $15,000.
I think after three months of not making goal I get canned. I can’t remember… there are so many different ways to get canned there. But I think I’m on the verge of redundancy with my crappy sales, and as much as I hate the job, I don’t want to get canned. The job is how I get my crappy health insurance, which gives me access to our crappy health care system, at prices I can’t afford even with the crappy insurance. I’m told we need this though. I’ve never been fired in my life from any job. I always do well. So this will be new for me. It also would not surprise me to show up one day and find the doors locked. That’s what they do when lay-offs happen. They don’t give you warning. They just lock the doors and say, “Ba-bye!” If Citigroup or Chase buys us, or God forbid, BOA, firing would be a mercy. Those guys make our bank look like Mother Theresa Bank. And trust me on this, we are total dicks.
I think the public is on to the fact that the government lies to us about basically everything. I personally think we are not “on the verge” of a recession, we are in a recession, and if all we get is a recession we will be lucky. Most of the people I know think that. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
That said, (or rather, plagiarized) ,I guess I better get back to work.
